River Surfing, Rugby Bonding and Bicycle Soaring

The connection between the Tribeca Film Festival and the sports cable network ESPN, now four years old, has brought the premieres of movies like David Mamet’s “Redbelt” and Spike Lee’s “Kobe Doin’ Work” to New York. This year the partnership is more noticeable than ever, as ESPN’s “30 for 30” series of original documentaries has raised sports films to a new prominence.

Of the seven films in the Tribeca/ESPN sports-film series, which begins on Thursday with “The Two Escobars,” three are part of the “30 by 30” schedule and will appear on television in the next few months (“The Two Escobars,” “Straight Outta L.A.” and “The Birth of Big Air”). But any fears that being in business with the home of “Sports Center” and “Monday Night Football” might compromise the festival’s downtown bona fides would be misplaced.

Only one of the films, “Straight Outta L.A.,” about the connections between the Raiders football franchise and the emergence of gangster rap, deals directly with corporate, major-league American sports. Otherwise the subject matter is international, D.I.Y., hipster-friendly: river surfing in Germany, amateur rugby in Finland (northern Finland, no less), a walk to the North Pole, a flight off a big-air bike ramp.

And “Straight Outta L.A.,” which was not screened for critics, has its own outsider credentials. In addition to being about the nexus of hip-hop and professional sports, it’s the film-directing debut of the onetime gangster rapper Ice Cube, who as a member of N.W.A. had firsthand experience of the Raiders’ Los Angeles heyday.

It shares another trait with this year’s festival selections: it uses the sports documentary as a vehicle to portray a culture in which athletics is the expression of a shared heritage or worldview. “The Two Escobars,” the most complex and ambitious of the films available for review, does this on the widest canvas. An examination of the lives and deaths of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the Colombian soccer player Andrés Escobar, it’s a portrait of Colombian society over the last three decades as seen through the lens of soccer.

Most American sports fans probably know the story of Andrés Escobar, a defender on the Colombian national team in 1994, who scored a goal into his own net during a crucial World Cup match with the United States and was later shot dead on the streets of Medellín. The film, directed by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, tells a larger story: that Colombia’s presence in the World Cup that year was a direct result of drug lords funneling some of their profits into that country’s professional soccer system, which fueled a resurgence during the ’80s and early ’90s. Since the country began cracking down on traffickers after Andrés Escobar’s death, its team has not qualified for the World Cup.

The film posits that had Pablo not been killed in 1993, Andrés (no relation) might not have died a year later. Pablo Escobar, a true soccer nut and a devoted patron of the game, this theory goes, would not have allowed the killing to take place.

On a much lighter note Björn Richie Lob’s “Keep Surfing” is a look at a sports subculture — one that’s fascinating, frivolous or both — that should be an audience favorite. Mr. Lob hangs out with the river surfers of Munich, a politely bohemian bunch who drop in on the standing waves created when streams pass over rapids or through obstructed channels. It’s an oddly stately endeavor: the practitioners more or less surf in place, facing upstream and doing 360s and cutbacks across the face of the oncoming but stationary wave.

The complicated nature of modern male friendship is a theme latent in many of the films, and it comes to the forefront in Mika Ronkainen’s “Freetime Machos.” The story of a mediocre rugby club in Oulu, the largest city in northern Finland, the film is really a merciless portrait of the fragility of Finnish manhood, under assault by independent women, economic recession (layoffs at Nokia!) and the mainstreaming of gay culture. The weekend warriors of the Oulu rugby club are reminiscent of the black-metal musicians in the recent Norwegian documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”: both are responding to the erosion of their traditional Nordic cultures, one by burning down churches, the other by pulling down their pants on the team bus.

One caveat: Mr. Ronkainen’s film, described in press notes as a “documentary-comedy-drama,” feels a bit too good to be true. The camera always happens to capture the scenes he needs to make his points. If Christopher Guest (“Best in Show,” “Waiting for Guffman”) decided to make his next mock documentary about repressed Finnish rugby players, it might look a lot like “Freetime Machos.”

Two other films in the series examine the realm of extreme sport. Jeff Tremaine’s “Birth of Big Air” is a biography of the pioneering freestyle BMX rider Mat Hoffman, with his impressive medical history (2 comas, 21 broken bones, 23 surgeries, 100-plus concussions), and with many hyperbolic quotations — a constant of the extreme-sport genre — that include this one from Mr. Hoffman’s doctor: “He has stretched the limits of what we’ve been able to do medically for him.”

In “Into the Cold” the photographer Sebastian Copeland documents his own walk across the shrinking ice cap to the North Pole, noting signs of global warming along the way.

Not screened for critics was the film that may be of most interest to New Yorkers: Paul Crowder and Jon Small’s “Last Play at Shea,” which combines a history of the New York Mets with a history of one of their fans, Billy Joel, set to a soundtrack from Mr. Joel’s final performances at Shea Stadium.

A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2010, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: River Surfing, Rugby Bonding and Bicycle Soaring. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe